We found this on the Winn Parish-Office of Emergency Preparedness Facebook page:
Winn Parish has changed our Mass Alert System from FirstCall to CodeRED. This change was made due to cost increase. Our new provider, CodeRED has a good service, only problem is that I must ask you to sign up for some CodeRED services where you already had signed up for FirstCall.
Besides wishing that they had called us (we’re generally about 20%-30% less expensive than CodeRED), the other lesson we take from this is the wisdom of using a vendor-neutral enrollment site like USNEAR.org.
If Winn Parish had used the US National Emergency Alert Registry for its enrollments, it could have kept all of the community’s data and simply transferred it to their new vendor. And they probably would have gotten more sign-ups in the first place, since the USNEAR site has many advantages over typical sign-up pages.
Of course, USNEAR only started last year, so it wasn’t an option when they started with FirstCall. But maybe it’s a good idea now?
